The Why, How and What

Why I started designing my game world as I do dates back to my very first efforts.  Unlike JB, I never had the least impression that AD&D was the "highest expression" ... it was the only expression worth paying any attention to.  I never saw it as "the game" ... but as the bare bones of an unfinished concept that hardly touched the vision of D&D that I imagined.  Like Gus L, I saw AD&D as "a mess" — but unlike him, I recognized that every branch of human knowledge looks like a tremendous mess when we start to learn about it.  There is no single narrative in history, medicine, chemistry, biology, education or anything else one cares to point at.  Any argument that starts with, "it's a mess" and ends with "therefore it's not worth pursuing" is an observation made by a fool.  Everything is a mess until we understand it.

I never thought D&D as written was much of a game.  I've believed from my first times playing it that the essence of what made it great came from what players were willing to venture.  I saw no reason why the only pursuits in the game should be dungeons and more stuff; obviously just becoming more powerful was a pointless will-o-wisp, since there was always something more powerful.  No, no, the genius was that there were things that players, with their imaginations, could choose to pursue ... and damn the DM and what was "planned."  My first efforts as DM were built around the notion that "my plans" were always disposable!  The greater game was in the players trying to do things.

Thus the development of house rules, so awfully simple in those early years, were meant to make the game more immersive, with developing narratives that focused on more important things than what's in the next room.  Players will immolate themselves for a game that gives them the opportunity to touch upon matters of great significance or that which is fundamental to our existence.  That is why there are maps, complicated rules about combat, trade and changes to the character classes; that is why so much of the focus of my game is on politics, religion and social behaviour ... because these things MATTER in the course of our lives; they touch us viscerally in ways that experience and treasure never can.  And mind you, I'm not talking about silly notions like "role-play" and "story," or even "problem solving."  I'm talking about the need to create a game world that incorporates the deep rooted issues that plague us as people — notions of right and wrong, what has real value, what is our purpose, etcetera and etcetera.  For the game world to be truly immersive, the players must be put into situations where there are no solutions to the problems they encounter; where the events plumb deeper than story; where the players are forced to contemplate the unfolding events as themselves, and not just in role-play.

These were not things I fully understood at a young age; but as I became educated in university, sitting down with brilliant minds and discussing the big picture; and as my own experience piled higher and higher ... I began to see in clearer phrases what I'd been grasping for.  The game of D&D as it was invented is a childish, puerile plodding repetition of simple-minded events.  But D&D doesn't need to be any more limited by its infancy as a old man is limited by his having once been born.  The constant need of most folks to hamstring the game and infantilise it is something I'd hoped once to wreck; but, nyet.  Still, the why of what I do is decades past what the game was originally meant to be.

The how is self-evident.  I write and I demonstrate the game as much as I can.  I provide examples of the game being played by real people in text.  I have a wiki that I rework and rebuild year after year, slowly but suredly adding new material.  I design maps, I design on products, I work on designing new ways of looking at the game and put those into charts that I intend to use for my own game.  I rethink and deconstruct everything.  I take nothing on face value.  I argue and teach and think.  I build up a litany of perspectives, make connections with real world disciplines and their influence on the game and research game design from its basic structures to its dizzying heights.  I educate myself constantly.  I work.

And unlike my critics, unlike those who chafe and balk at every word I say, I have the evidence of that work online, where anyone can read it and more importantly, USE IT.  People ask if they can steal some idea or scheme and I tell them, that's why it's online.  Anyone can see what I've done and what I'm doing, every day.

Whereas I have NO ONE I can turn to.  There are no blogs churning out constructive world designs, no wikis that do more than repeat the cheap knock-off material found on the WOTC's website, no innovative approaches, no perspectives on human knowledge's influence on D&D from professionals in their fields ... nope, nada, nothing.  I read a few people regularly because they have insight and intelligence, but these people NEVER offer anything concrete and useful.  No one, anywhere, can right now dredge up a url that will do more than repeat the same old hackneyed garbage that was perfectly viable 35 years ago ... and therefore has not progressed at all in 35 years!

I am alone here.  And every person who reads me, likes me, hates me, resents me, mocks me or otherwise acknowledges me knows it.  I know it too.  And I don't talk about it, because I know how that makes other people feel.

But I am alone because I earned it.  And I won't pretend otherwise.

None of this would mean a damn thing if it were not for the what.  D&D cannot be run on "why" or "how."  It has to be run on what.  What do the players see, what is the world like, what lives here, what does this thing do, what are these abilities, what's there to do?  My game world is a vast collection of whats.  Every what is a player choice, or a place to go, or a reason to act.  And until a DM begins to accumulate a sufficient number of whats, the game is a cheesy, pasteboard, pretentious smidge of what it might be.

Stories are not enough.  The world's knowledge and set of options are not made up of fictions, but of non-fictions.  Your family, your passions, your education, your decisions to travel, your intentions and aspirations, your limitations, your aptitudes, your failings, your resilience and willingness to keep heading on no matter how brutal and difficult life gets ... these are NOT fictions, they are non-fictions.  They are the facts of your existence.  Until the game world incorporates some of these characteristics that you have into a milieu that can draw upon and enhance these things, the game is as disposable as Monopoly.

Dungeons, Dragons and Fairy Princesses are delightful and all, but taken unto themselves without anything concrete to give them weight, they are fatuous.  They are playthings.  WE are not children.  Our souls are not satisfied by a child's playtoys.  We need more.  We need things dense and rich enough to properly fill our bellies.  The "what," therefore, has to be all the parts of the world that we reckon with consciously, with or without our leave, because we are not naive.  We are not blind.

D&D, like any art, has the potential to shrink these things to a manageable size, so that we can roll them around, contemplating them, considering them ... so that when we are ready to walk away from the table, we have a tool or two more to tackle these real issues in real life.

Those who want to hammer D&D into a flawed, insipid escapist fantasy are simply people who haven't yet learned how to live.  I pity them, but I haven't the wherewithal to condone them.